Math with Navarro

ALEKS INFORMATION

About ALEKS

ALEKS is an online program that helps students learn math at their own pace. At the beginning of the year, students will take an initial "Knowledge Check" to see which math topics they know, which topics they need to revisit, and which topics they are ready to learn for the first time.

ALEKS Grading

ALEKS makes up 10% of students' grades. Each week, students are assigned to complete a certain number of topics (at the beginning of the year, all students complete the same number of topics, but after the first month or so I will individualize this number for each student).

I will calculate a student's weekly topic grade by converting the number of completed topics vs. the number of assigned topics into a percentage. The ALEKS program sends me a weekly report of each student's activity, which includes the amount of time they spent working on topics and how many they both attempted and completed. I can even see if a student logged in or not... 😉

Knowledge Check scores are also calculated into students' grades (these are discussed more below). Knowledge Checks are worth 50 points for all students regardless of how many topics they should have completed in a 3 week window.

Completing Topics

Students should click on "Continue My Path" on the left side menu on their ALEKS dashboard. ALEKS will automatically start on a topic the student still needs to master, but students can change their topic in the top menu. In order to complete a topic, students have to answer 3 questions in a row correctly. If students answer any questions incorrect, their progress bar at the top of the page goes back to 0.

I encourage students to take notes about all of their topics they work on, especially the topics that are particularly difficult for them. It might even be a good idea to keep a notebook specifically dedicated to ALEKS topics. Students can use their notes when they complete a Knowledge Check at school!

If you notice that your student is really struggling to complete their topics, please reach out to me! We may need to adjust the grade level they were placed into or the number of topics I have assigned, and I am more than happy to do either or both of those things. This would only be for extreme cases, like your student is up at night for hours or you notice that they cannot complete any topics. For most students, this would only happen later in the year as their topics get more challenging.

For Parents

If you would like to see how many topics your student has completed, have them log into their ALEKS dashboard. On the bottom of the screen, you should see a button that says "Timeline Detail". If you click this and use the arrows to navigate left (back in time) and right (forward in time) you can clearly see how many topics your student has completed and on what days. This is a great way to hold students accountable and also help them set a routine for completing work at home!

Knowledge Checks

Every third Friday, students will complete a Knowledge Check at school. These cannot be done at home. If a student is absent, I will have them make it up when they return. There may be a time where a Knowledge Check is scheduled to land on a day off of school, in which case we will bump it up a week for a 2-week window.

Knowledge Checks are designed to make sure students actually mastered the topics they completed in the last 3 weeks. These typically take 20-30 minutes and students are allowed to use any notes they have taken, scratch paper or a dry erase board, and even a calculator for certain questions. Students do not know if they have answered questions correctly or incorrectly, and they cannot see their scores at the end of the Knowledge Check. However, they can see how many topics they have "mastered".

Here is a scenario to put this into perspective:

Let's say a student is expected to complete 10 topics each week (a "friendly" number, yay!). That means that over a 3 week period they should have mastered 30 topics.

If they have actually completed their weekly topics for all 3 weeks, then they will most likely master 30/30 topics on their Knowledge Check. This is a 100% A+!
If they forgot some topics over the 3 week period, or just didn't do some of their topics, they could expect to master fewer than 30 topics. Pro Tip: This is where the ALEKS notes come in handy - they can help students remember what they have learned!
If they didn't do ANY of their topics (or a "friend" did their topics for them*), then hopefully they can somehow get lucky and answer a few questions right on their Knowledge Check, but this grade will probably still be a D or an F.

* Students should only be completing their own topics. I know, this is obvious, but in the past I have seen students trying to "help" their friends stay on top of assignments by just doing someone else's topics. This is the opposite of being helpful, and actually sets students up for failure on their Knowledge Checks.

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